IBM Intelligent Operations Center

Providing insight, oversight, and smooth collaboration

In many areas these days, it seems we have to work smarter and
do more with less. Smarter cities must leverage information, anticipate
problems, and coordinate resources. Luckily, IBM Intelligent Operations
Center provides a unified view of all city agencies so you can predict events
and respond quickly. In this article, learn about Intelligent Operations
Center's features and explore its benefits, such as: centralized intelligence
about your enterprise; collaboration to efficiently resolve issues; reduced
overall cost of maintenance and repairs; and preservation of critical services
and resources.

Tony Carrato is the chief product architect for Smarter Cities products in SWG Industry Solutions. He is responsible for architecture across the IBM Intelligent Operations Center, IBM Intelligent Transportation, and other products in the Smarter Cities portfolio. Previously, Tony was a lead architect on the SWG SOA Advanced Technology team. He has over 30 years of IT experience and has worked in North America, Asia, and Australia. Tony is an IBM Senior Certified IT Architect, an Open Group Certified Distinguished IT Architect, and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

Pam Nesbitt is senior technical staff member in Industry Solutions Software. In the last year she has focused on aligning IBM business and technical strategies, and enabling clients with IBM Smarter Cities solutions. Her previous activities include software development and solutions delivery to clients. Ms. Nesbitt has won several external and internal awards, has presented at numerous international conferences, and has published in several peer-reviewed journals. She is an IBM Master Inventor with 110 patents issued and pending with the USPTO. She holds a B.S. in Neurobiology from Cornell University and an MCIS from Cleveland State University.

Mike Kehoe, the product manager for Intelligent Operations Center in the
Industry Solutions Smarter Cities portfolio, is in the Software Solutions
Group. He also provides guidance to the other Smarter Cities product
managers. Mike has a long history with IBM in the CIO organization and in
manufacturing systems. He is trained as a control systems engineer and has
an extensive background in business intelligence and analytics.

Introduction

City leaders and executives are expected to provide environments that are,
first and foremost, secure. A secure, desirable environment is a place
where people want to live and work, with:

The potential for growth, jobs, and new business.

A robust and enriching lifestyle.

Healthful venues.

Green space for exercise, community, and collaboration.

Leaders often have to make an aged infrastructure work with today's
demands. They need to simultaneously supply an adaptive, open architecture
and platform for growth that can handle: requirements of legacy
city systems, new business, and rapid expansion for the vitality of the
enterprise.

IBM Intelligent Operations Center addresses these challenging issues by
providing insight, management, and oversight capabilities for any
enterprise. It allows the operation of a smarter city, or any similarly
complex enterprise requiring collaboration among multiple entities, with
oversight by only a few people. Intelligent Operations Center delivers a
collaborative workspace and "at a glance" status, along with:

Event management.

Event to incident escalation.

Support for creating and executing standard operating procedures
(SOPs).

Assessing and displaying key performance indicators (KPIs).

Adaptability and easy addition of more functions.

City leaders need to quickly ascertain the overall status of their city or
enterprise. They need to be able to swiftly identify issues requiring
attention. Leaders might also need information from multiple sources, such
as publicly available websites, weather sources, or other feeds. Because
Intelligent Operations Center can recognize events as they arise, having your SOP responses in
place helps manage impacts with optimum efficiency.

A major benefit of Intelligent Operations Center is that it aggregates
several information feeds and makes sense of them in the context of the
person viewing them. Its dashboards support different facilities, as shown
in the executive view Figure 1.

Figure 1. Intelligent Operations
Center executive view

High-level design

Intelligent Operations Center performs in the context of a collaborative
workspace that has support for multiple roles with different levels of
access. Its appearance varies depending on who you are. The role-based
context, which is enormously powerful, is necessary because Intelligent
Operations Center provides so many avenues to data discovery. Out of the
wealth of information flowing through it, Intelligent Operations Center
can customize and display information that the viewer needs, showing only
the information necessary for their role. Intelligent Operations
Center also includes analytics, reporting support, and the ability to
export information to other systems.

IBM designed Intelligent Operations Center as an extensible platform that
allows "snapping on" of additional functions from customer engagements,
business partners, or other use cases that can add functions. Examples of
snap-on products include IBM Intelligent Transportation, IBM Intelligent
Building Management, and Smart Vision Suite for security management.

Flexible displays

IBM has experience in making cities smarter and understands the importance
of immediate and direct communication between key agencies. To provide
communication capability, Intelligent Operations Center facilitates
immediate interpersonal chat through a built-in and secure instant
messaging system. Intelligent Operations Center also fosters a climate of
real-time accountability through visible workflow enaction and status.
With Intelligent Operations Center, you can:

Define SOPs.

Govern responses to incidents.

Streamline and simplify adherence to guidelines.

Implement process automation.

Figure 1 shows a "heat map" that displays the KPIs for
the city. The flexibility in displaying KPIs highlights Intelligent
Operations Center's value. A properly configured KPI dashboard will
provide in one screen, at a glance, all the necessary information to gauge
the health of an agency, utility, or city.

You can choose KPIs to measure nearly anything of importance to city
leaders, from the number of traffic accidents this calendar quarter to the
on-time performance of the public transportation system. Intelligent
Operations Center receives metrics for KPIs and uses them to compute the
actual KPI.

For example, for bus performance the metrics might indicate, for each bus,
whether it is ahead of schedule, on time, or behind schedule. Once rolled
up with all the other bus information, this might compute to a single
metric that indicates whether, on average, the buses are on schedule. City
bus administrators can rest easy if they see, at one glance, that the
average bus arrival is green. This probably means that, on average, buses
are arriving at approximately their scheduled times. If this KPI turns
yellow or red, the administrator can determine the cause and act
appropriately.

Due to the hierarchical nature of KPIs, you can uncover and act upon the
underlying cause of the KPI change. Intelligent Operations Center provides
the simplicity of an overarching and all-telling dashboard, and the
necessary underlying detail to determine a cause and enact appropriate
remediation.

Events

A major facet of Intelligent Operations Center is its ability to consume
event information. Events represent occurrences of important
happenings across the management domain represented by Intelligent
Operations Center. It presents events appropriately to the user based on
their role. Executives might view events as rollups or KPIs. Operators
might see events in a list or on a map, and may respond to them based on
their displayed urgency.

Events usually have a point in time, a location, and a type. For example,
a water main break at a particular street intersection would qualify as an
event. Events can also be things that you expect to happen in the future.
Future events are useful for coordination purposes. For instance, multiple
city agencies might plan roadwork for the same section of a road. The
Intelligent Operations Center can correlate the events and enable
collaboration so the city tears up the road only once instead of multiple
times.

Intelligent Operations Center receives an event or a metric for a KPI, in
the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) format. CAP, a standard protocol
developed by OASIS (see Resources), enables the
Intelligent Operations Center to consume information about events in a
city or enterprise. The CAP format is quite simple and useful, even though
it entails a minimal amount of information. The sender includes only
relevant information about the event's location, severity, and other
important details. The relative commonality and extreme extensibility of
the CAP protocol make it a useful choice for interchange with the
Intelligent Operations Center. It is also simple to use Intelligent
Operations Center's enterprise service bus to map non-CAP messages into
CAP format.

Typical flow

After receiving the CAP alert, Intelligent Operations Center examines it
and determines whether it is a KPI metric. If yes, Intelligent Operations
Center forwards it to its KPI processing engine where it evaluates the
metric and updates the appropriate visual representation of the KPI. If
the message describes an event rather than a KPI, Intelligent Operations
Center handles it differently by making an entry in the geospatial
database and showing it on the map, which typically appears on the
operator dashboard. Intelligent Operations Center also displays the event
as a line item in the event list on the same dashboard, as in Figure 2.

After Intelligent Operations Center recognizes an event, it can choose
several different actions to mediate or manage the event. Typically, a
first action involves escalating the event to an incident. The operator
might first consult SOPs and communicate with local teams through
Intelligent Operations Center's collaboration tools. An incident is
flagged as something requiring special attention and handling. After an
event has been escalated to an incident, a workflow or other predefined
series of actions will be kicked off in accordance with an SOP.

SOPs are predefined instructions for dealing with things that a city can
anticipate and plan for. SOPs can be reduced programmatically to a series
of steps and actions—some automated, and some requiring a human to
make a decision. Intelligent Operations Center can describe SOPs in detail
and initiate them as needed. SOPs streamline the process, and do not:

Skip steps.

Require manual look-up of information.

Circumvent the usual routes of approvals and necessary oversight.

Automating certain tasks, such as providing a phone number rather than
prescribing the action "call hospital," makes the workflows that much more
valuable. However, you should still respect the need for a human to make decisions
at certain points in the flow.

Summary

The IBM Intelligent Operations Center provides a unified view of all city
agencies so you can predict events and respond quickly. In this
introductory article, you learned about the high-level design, flexible
displays for different roles, events, and the typical flow when an event
becomes an incident.

Resources

Learn

IBM Intelligent Operations Center: See how to coordinate your
city to deliver exceptional service to citizens. Learn about the features,
benefits, system requirements, services, support, and more.

IBM Smarter Cities: Get information about IBM Intelligent
Operations Center for Smarter Cities and how it can be used to synchronize
and analyze efforts among sectors and agencies as they happen, giving
decision makers consolidated information that helps them anticipate,
rather than just react to, problems.

Get products and technologies

IBM Smarter City Solutions on Cloud: IBM Intelligent Operations
Center on IBM SmartCloud offers a straightforward, user-based subscription
service at a single price that includes all costs, including hardware,
software, maintenance, support, and networking.

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